A drawing of cows and sheep walking towards the viewer, together in a group with three shepherds, the tallest of them pointing to the left with a stick Castiglione’s earliest known works are pastoral landscapes, a genre that was a speciality of minor Genoese painters, and he was to return to this subject matter throughout his life. The drawings of shepherds with flocks produced in the early to mid 1630s (RCIN 903891, 903892, 904014, 904016) are executed in oil paint on paper, a distinctive technique that soon became Castiglione’s hallmark. Like many of his drawings they are probably finished works of art rather than studies for paintings. How (or even if) Castiglione used drawings to prepare for his paintings is uncertain: he did not work out the details of his paintings with sequences of preliminary studies, and both his oil drawings and his paintings on canvas were executed with little if any underdrawing.